Alan Titchmarsh
‘I’ve got more faith in millennials than previous generations’
‘Oh, that’s so lovely,” says Alan Titchmarsh, quietly, after roaring with laughter. “Oh, I cherish that!” I’ve just told him that I could still sing the Ground Force theme tune, if he wanted, which inspires him to awkwardly grasp for my hand and give it the kind of heartfelt, no-nonsense shake you’d expect from the country’s favourite Yorkshireman. I’m not entirely sure, but I think those pale blue eyes might be moistening – just a little bit.
We’re not meant to be talking about his Nineties gardening show, which made decking and Charlie Dimmock’s décolletage national phenomena. Titchmarsh and I are ensconced in a boardroom of his publisher’s office ahead of the release of The Scarlet Nightingale, his 11th novel and a derring-do war thriller – his 70th book, released in his 70th year.
It’s the first time that Titchmarsh has put a female character – plucky, bereaved country-girl-turned-spy Rosamund Hawkins – at the centre of a book. He says he built her out of attributes that he admires (“quite worldly, but not chippy”) in other women he’s known and respected, such as Mary Ellis, the last surviving female Second World War pilot who died aged 101 in July, and Barbara Cartland: “She could take the mickey out of herself.”
The Scarlet Nightingale is dedicated to Jilly Cooper, who, in 2001, edited the first chapters of his maiden novel, Only Dad. “Whenever we meet now, she gives me the whole ‘I’m so proud of you’ speech,” he says, “like I’m her protégé.”
It’s difficult to imagine Titchmarsh being anybody’s protégé. The “angst-ridden” and “very unconfident” lad from Yorkshire, who found solace in gardening, “creative endeavour” and presenting, has always seemed to forge his own path with the determination of a hoe in frozen clay. Titchmarsh retains the weathered air of a man who feels most at home outside, but his crisp gingham shirt is the product of decades in the media. He’s been presenting and writing for 45 years, including 30 Chelsea Flower Shows and six series of Gardeners’ World. His famously amenable approach – “I don’t like to tub-thump, the way I do it is by showing how much I’m enjoying it,” he says – was a stiff breeze to the horticultural broadcasting establishment, and belied the fact that he earned his horticultural diploma at Kew, and taught there before turning up on what he calls “the box”.
As a self-taught, twentysomething gardener myself, Titchmarsh was one of the few celebrity horticulturalists I’d heard of, and one whose written advice seemed to soothe and encourage.
“I’ve got more faith and hope in this generation than previous ones,” he says, rolling up pressed cuffs, “because you millennials go out and live for the day.”
Titchmarsh seems alarmingly positive about most things or, at least, alarmingly open-minded.
He voted remain, but can see why people didn’t (“I have enormous sympathies for the reasons that people wanted to leave. I couldn’t live anywhere else, I love it here, but I think it’s a shame to become insular, because insularity means lack of understanding”), and maintains he has succeeded due to luck and flexibility.
Even when I raise the greatest controversy of his career – being
‘Political correctness has gone mad. Diversity quotas are an insult’
replaced by Monty Don and gardening “enthusiast” Sophie Raworth for the BBC’S Chelsea Flower Show coverage – he is sanguine: “I either spend the rest of my time being eaten away by it or I just get on.
“I’ve met him,” he says of Don, “we talk. It’s the way of the world. I’m of an age where I’m lucky to still be on the box, and I’m only there because I’ve got my own hair.” Titchmarsh still holds his Yorkshire upbringing responsible for much of this happy-go-lucky attitude. “I don’t think I have a right to complain – that’s what’s at the bottom of it,” he explains. “I was told I wouldn’t amount to much, and I believed it. I’m chuffed to bits about what I’ve been allowed to do, but if it all ended tomorrow I wouldn’t go to the tabloids and say ‘It’s all wrong’.”
He has little time for melodrama or professional temper tantrums, which he’s witnessed behind the scenes but refuses to name names (“There are some people who deserve a bit of a smack”), and thinks it’s a shame that “the little niceties” are allowed to slide. Titchmarsh remembers an American tourist wearing a baseball hat in church while the national anthem played, which sends him into a vague existential crisis: “I thought perhaps I’m very old-fashioned because it mattered to me, and it made me question whether I was being silly.”
Nor does he believe in diversity quotas. “Political correctness has gone mad,” he tells me, quite unprompted. “I struggle with tokenism because I think that’s an insult to the problem. To say we must have this many women, this many men and this many people of ethnic diversity to tick a box – no, no, no. It’s a cheat’s way out. It breeds ill-feeling.” Instead, Titchmarsh offers the “idealist” situation of “the best person for the job gets the job”.
Such values – especially being a good judge of character – are the glue that have kept his marriage, to Alison, together for four decades. “They’re hard to relinquish if you were to move on, in search of bells and whistles,” he explains, full of northern euphemism. “The bells and whistles, they tend to get fainter with age. Something deeper is worthwhile.” Titchmarsh catches himself, cracks a joke about us having an accidental therapy session. He says the important things are “loyalty and the ability to be a bit tenacious, to know when it’s worth persevering and to know when it really isn’t”.
And, while he won’t admit as much, some of the dozens of emails he still gets a day from fans must be amorous in nature – his Madame Tussauds waxwork receives extra cleaning attention due to the lipstick kisses left by fans. “I’m very happy in female company,” he says, after squirming when I remind him that the Queen told him: “You give a lot of ladies a lot of pleasure”, as he collected his MBE in 2000.
When I ask him what prospects my generation of gardeners face, Titchmarsh bounces with joy when talking about his freshly cut wild flower meadow. “I went out and the fragrance of that mown hay… I felt myself welling up. I looked up at the blue sky and said, ‘I’m in the right job, this is why I do what I do, this is what matters.’
“If I can get that across, and get that moment of pause in this generation,” he says, catching breath, “they are the next custodians of this landscape – I want them to care for it and love it and enjoy it.”
Join The Telegraph for An Evening With Alan Titchmarsh at Cadogan Hall, London, on Wednesday Sept 19. Doors open 6.30pm. Tickets (£35) include a signed copy of Alan’s novel, The Scarlet Nightingale. For tickets, visit telegraph. co.uk/alanauthor or call 0800 542 5859.
To order The Scarlet Nightingale (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk